Facilitating Technology Transfer
21 May 2012
How can organisations set themselves up to facilitate technology transfer? Niall Mottram, VP Innovation & Technology Management, comments on a guest post by Markus Fromherz, CIO Healthcare at Xerox, published on Forbes.com
To see the Forbes.com article click
here
This article gives an excellent example of applying a technology from an adjacent industry to find a solution to a problem in the medical sector. This isn’t new, but it takes a certain belief in your identified technology to push it through. In my day to day work, we refer to this as Technology Transfer.
So how can organizations set themselves up to facilitate Technology Transfer? The approach that we advocate takes a combination of focused knowledge sharing and a management approach that avoids staff silos. By applying these two rules even the largest organisations can start to harness the tacit knowledge built up in the heads of its employees. Supplement this with techniques employed by organizations in different sectors, particularly those with shorter product development cycles than yours, and you have a great base to start identifying solutions that you never thought possible. In the current environment this is particularly important.
We are seeing the parameters of device innovation in the medical space changing with US healthcare reform, so the need to source solutions from new arenas is becoming even greater and organizations will need to find ways to respond.
Niall Mottram
Vice President Innovation & Technology Management
Sagentia Inc.